VMworld 2012: DataCore SANsymphony-V Virtualizes Storage

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Michael Otey

Wed, 2012-08-29 13:27

One of the most interesting meetings I had at this year’s VMworld 2012 was with Steve Houck Chief Operating Officer of DataCore Software. Steve explained that DataCore has been in the storage virtualization business for the past 14 years and that SANsymphony-V is the ninth release of their flagship product. Just like VMware virtualizes compute and memory resources, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V abstracts and virtualizes storage resources.

SANsymphony-V is Windows based software that creates a virtual storage layer on top of whatever physical storage your organization has. It supports all of the popular hypervisors including VMware vSphere, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. It also integrates with Microsoft System Center and VMware’s vCenter. SANSymphony-V provides all of the features you’d expect to find in a storage infrastructure product including:

Data pooling

Online snapshots

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and recovery

Thin provisioning

Auto-tiering

Synchronous and asynchronous replication

Disk migration

Load balancing

RAID striping

SANSymphony-V automatically manages all of the underlying storage operations. It allows you to create up to 15 different tiers for your multiple storage devices and it can automatic move data between tiers based on how hot the data is. For instance, if a given application hits a high number of reads for a given piece of data SANSymphony-V can automatically move that data to higher performance storage. SANsymphony-V is priced based on the number of nodes and capacity and a typical installation costs about $10,000 dollars.